LSU’s Brian Kelly needs to find a better excuse

The line would have gotten a standing ovation on the rubber chicken circuit in 1994.

“We’re not in the market of buying players,” LSU coach Brian Kelly told WAFB-TV’s Jacques Ducet this week. “Unfortunately, right now, that’s what some guys are looking for. They want to be bought.”

Unfortunately for Kelly, it’s 2024. State legislatures and the federal court system have dismantled the horizontal price-fixing scheme that kept the college football labor market suppressed for decades. The seals don’t clap for amateurism anymore. But just as always, they clap for wins. The way to win now is to pay players in a way that creates the most competitive roster possible. Everyone is in the market for buying players, just as everyone is in the market for buying waiters, accountants, doctors, plumbers and football coaches.

LSU was aggressive in the coach-buying market in late 2021, buying Kelly’s services for $95 million over 10 years. The reason he left Notre Dame, he has said, was to come to a place fully invested in competing for national titles. The three previous head coaches at LSU (Nick Saban, Les Miles, Ed Orgeron) all won national titles. So the assumption was that Kelly — who could get close at Notre Dame but who couldn’t build a deep enough roster to truly compete — would take the next step at a place where being the best in the country is a job requirement.

Only now Kelly sounds like someone who doesn’t want to work at a place that demands national championships. In today’s college football, managing name, image and likeness payments and the amounts given to each player is part of the job at schools that want to compete for national titles. There is no salary cap, but there also isn’t an unlimited money tree. So college staffs must manage their resources like NFL staffs. They must create the best roster in the most cost-effective manner possible.

Had Kelly said it like that, his statement wouldn’t have set the college football Internet ablaze. Doucet’s question related to LSU’s pursuit of defensive tackles in the spring transfer portal window. The Tigers didn’t get any. TCU transfer Damonic Williams considered LSU (and Texas) but ultimately chose Oklahoma. Michigan State transfer Simeon Barrow considered LSU but chose Miami. In both cases, LSU got outbid.

It is here where the cynical or the rival might say LSU’s collective is broke. But that isn’t true. What Kelly should have said is the truth: The thin supply of capable defensive tackles combined with soaring demand for capable defensive tackles drove the market price to a level LSU wasn’t comfortable paying. Think trying to find bottled water or batteries six hours before a hurricane. Think trying to get an Uber at 6 p.m. on a Friday in New York when it’s raining. Huge demand. Minuscule supply. If the pricing shifts with demand, it skyrockets.

We could argue that Kelly and LSU should have agreed to the prices because LSU needs defensive tackle depth to shore up what was one of the nation’s worst defenses last year. But Kelly would have an effective counterargument that these particular defensive tackles might not have been worth the prices they commanded relative to the players already on LSU’s roster. Kelly also could have made a convincing argument that paying the spring portal market price might have upset the balance of a locker room full of players who agreed to the winter portal price or the retained former high school recruit price. Texas made this same calculation in the Williams negotiation. But Steve Sarkisian isn’t pretending that Texas doesn’t want to buy the best players because Texas absolutely wants to buy them. If the price is right.

We all work with people who make more and less money than us. This system works fine — until someone realizes they’re better at their job than someone who is making a lot more. Multiple schools have passed on potential transfers for this reason. They don’t want someone already on their roster seeing the deal for a new guy who isn’t better and then demanding a new deal. 

Does this absolve Kelly for LSU’s defensive tackle situation? No. While the Tigers signed six defensive linemen out of high school in the class of 2024, they signed three edge rushers and zero interior defensive linemen in 2023. It would have been nice to have some players in the pipeline when incumbent tackles Maason Smith and Mekhi Wingo left for the NFL. 

One reason for this is LSU didn’t hire current defensive line coach Bo Davis until mid-January, and a lot of the best players had already chosen new schools by then. Davis is one of the best in the nation at his job, and he’s fresh off helping Texas defensive tackles Byron Murphy II and Te’Vondre Sweat develop into a first- and second-rounder, respectively. Again, this is where the failure of the class of 2023 comes home to roost. Imagine handing Davis some older LSU-level recruits to mold. The Tigers will do with the class of 2024, but the larger the player, the more difficult to rely upon as a freshman.

“We developed three defensive linemen that all got drafted this year, and we’ll do that again,” Kelly told Doucet. “But if you’re just looking to get paid, you’re looking in the wrong place.”

This is disingenuous. One of those players was Wingo, who was a freshman All-SEC selection at Missouri before transferring to LSU prior to the 2022 season. He didn’t come for free.

If Kelly is going to make excuses for his team’s lack of depth on the defensive line, it would serve him better to make those excuses honestly. “We didn’t think the juice was worth the squeeze” is a perfectly acceptable answer in this era of college football. 

“We’re not in the market of buying players” sounds like something a very expensive coach would say when doesn’t truly understand what he was bought to do.